Scientific Concepts Working Group

This SONet working group focuses on identifying and organizing scientist-oriented terminologies as extensions to the SONet core data model

Overview

The goal of this working group is
to define ontology extensions to the SONet core data model for organizing
observations according to scientifically meaningful concepts (e.g., ecological
community, sedimentation, biological invasion, etc.). This working group will
initially be focused on developing relevant concept hierarchies for classifying
the specific observation types identified by the Observations Catalog Working Group.

The ontologies created will be designed with specific applications in mind. Examples
include providing (1) meaningful navigation hierarchies to scientists for
finding and organizing relevant observation data, (2) improved data discovery
and search capabilities, and (3) unified terminologies and semantic relationships
for use in data integration. Another major task of this subgroup will be to
compare and contrast existing ontology approaches for organizing scientific
concepts and for representing abstract knowledge, with the goal of creating more flexible
organizations that can accommodate a wide range of scientific observations.